The Circle - Review

 

In any kind of entertainment, be it video games, books, theatre, television or movies, there’s always a debate between showing versus telling. Generally, the agreement is that you should show instead of tell.

Don’t tell the audience about how sad a character is, let us see it in their tears and frown, not in their monotone monologues. The other films of director James Ponsoldt (“The Spectacular Now,” “The End of the Tour”) know this well. “The Circle” does not.

One of the biggest disappointments, if not the biggest, is how the film wastes its great cast. Emma Watson (“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2,” “Beauty and the Beast (2017)”) is left to play a two-dimensional character, Mae, who has virtually no impact on the story. John Boyega (“Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” “Attack the Block”) is in a total of six minutes of the film, half of that standing in the shadows brooding.

Karen Gillan (“Doctor Who,” “Guardians of the Galaxy”) fares better as Mae’s friend Annie, but she too falls subject to the poorly written script. The minor characters; Mae’s friend Mercer, her parents, are just flat out forgettable. The only ones who escape the fate of being awful are Tom Hanks (“Forrest Gump,” “Saving Private Ryan”) and Patton Oswalt (“Ratatouille,” “The Goldbergs”) as the heads of The Circle. They both exude a wonderful sinister kind of cheeriness to them. The script seems to give them the best lines, best scenes, and most character development as well.

Pacing is all over the place, and at times the film feels like it’s made up of three different acts from three different films. The first act is an amusing, but unbearably slow paced, look at a Google-like social media company. The second act plays like a drama where we get to see how a terrible Big Brother like company was formed. The third act feels straight out of a poorly written sci-fi spy film. None of it gels together and the writing doesn’t help either.

However, not all is bad. The music is good, showing that Danny Elfman (“Batman (1989),” “Beetlejuice”) can get some great music out of synth instruments, and the aforementioned second act is surprisingly strong, for about 15 minutes.

Taking it down to a basic level, the biggest issue of the film is this; there is no connection with the characters because the film doesn’t understand showing versus telling. One scene has a character telling another how overworked and sad she was, but that she is now better.

The movie never shows us any scenes of her looking sad or overworked though, so this does little to engage the audience. Also, given that The Circle is a social media juggernaut, it’s disappointing that we are only shown two of their products; the two products that are important to the plot, and are only told about the dozens of other fascinating things they’ve created. Also, side note: that is not a real ending!

“The Circle” takes a great cast, great director, and great source material (the 2013 novel written by the film’s screenwriter Dave Eggers) and makes it into sloppy sci-fi thriller. With zero sense of pacing, an insultingly low quality script and forgettable characters, this “Circle” is pointless. 1/5